We went on vacation….

And I need a vacation from my vacation.  My girls are 2.5 and almost 4 (September birthday).  I talked my husband in to taking a beach vacation with the $500 Visa I received from my online offers and some money I made at a garage sale with my stockpiled items.  The beach is always a dream vacation for us – sand, warm weather, the ocean, seashells.  The east coast is nothing like the cold Oregon coast where we grew up.  All of those things sound so wonderful when running through my head.

Packing wasn’t terrible.  We left later than I wanted on Monday because I was stuck at a doctor’s office fooooorrrrrreeever.  Once we were on the road I was convinced it would be a great trip.  Then the “how many more minutes” began.  The dog couldn’t get comfortable.  The movie in the dvd player wasn’t working right.  The older girl hit the younger girl.  Things started looking glum very quickly.  We had not made it 100 miles when my husband muttered under his breath “We are NOT going to Disney at Christmas.”

When we arrived at the hotel the dog was wound up from the car ride.  He barked the entire time we left him in the room to get dinner so we had to go get him.  He growled and barked all night long, which means the four of us didn’t sleep well.  The next morning I called and found a place to board him.  Things started looking up!  Then we took the girls to the beach and they were both terrified of the ocean.  Alyssa (2.5) didn’t want to even put her feet on the sand.  It appeared as if our perfect little vacation wasn’t going to be perfect.

My husband and I were determined to make the vacation work.  Thank goodness we stayed at a newly constructed Hampton hotel that had a terrific trio of pools.  There was an 18″ pool that the girls LOVED and a zero entry pool which was also a success.  The hot tub was unbearably hot and putting our feet in made them feel like they were on fire.  If it had not been for the hotel pools our vacation would have been a bust.

Maybe the simplest things in life are really what life is about.  All we needed was a zero entry pool and the girls would have loved spending three days in the pool with mommy and daddy.   Although our vacation was zero dollars out of pocket there are other things we could have done that would have been equally as fun.

I cannot help but wonder if we talked the vacation up too much?  Were the six plus hours in the car too much?  Were the girls just too little to travel?  Despite all the hiccups we are home and the girls talk about how much fun they had at the beach.  I am determined to print the happy photos and archive the unhappy ones.  If I can bring myself to think like a 2.5 and almost 4 year old then maybe our vacation really was terrific.  And maybe, just maybe, we can still go to Disney this year.